Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version by Philip Pullman Read Free Book Online

see about that,’ said the old man. ‘If you turn out to be stronger than me, I’ll let you go. But you won’t. Now come along this way.’
    The old man led the boy through the castle, along dark corridors and down dark stairways, till they came to a smithy deep in the bowels of the earth.
    ‘Now let’s see who’s stronger,’ he said, and he took an axe and with one blow drove an anvil into the ground.
    ‘I can do better than that,’ said the boy. He took the axe and struck the other anvil in such a way that it split wide open for a moment, and in that moment the boy seized the old man’s beard and wedged it in the anvil. The anvil closed up, and there was the old man, caught.
    ‘I’ve got you,’ said the boy. ‘Now you’ll see who’s going to die.’
    And he took an iron bar and beat the old man mercilessly, raining blows on him till he whimpered and moaned and cried, ‘All right! Stop! I give in!’
    And he promised to give the boy great riches if only he’d let him go. The boy twisted the axe in the crack and released his beard, and the old man led him to another cellar deep under the castle, and showed him three chests full of gold.
    ‘One of these is for the poor,’ he explained, ‘one is for the king, and the third is yours.’
    At that moment midnight struck, and the old man disappeared, leaving the boy in the dark.
    ‘Well, so much for that,’ he said. ‘I can find my own way back.’
    Groping along the walls, he made his way back to the bedroom and fell asleep by the fire.
    In the morning the king came in.
    ‘You must have learned how to shudder by now,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I wonder what they can be, these shivers? I lay down with my dead cousin, and then an old man with a long beard came and showed me some treasure, but no one showed me how to shiver.’
    They brought the gold up and shared it out, and then the boy and the princess were married. In due course he inherited the kingdom. But no matter how much he loved his wife, or how happy he was, the young king kept on saying, ‘If only I could get the shivers! If only I knew what it meant to get the shivers!’
    In the end it got on the young queen’s nerves. She told her chambermaid, who said, ‘Leave it to me, your majesty. I’ll give him the shivers all right.’
    The maid went down to the brook and caught a bucketful of minnows. That night when the young king was sleeping, the maid told the queen to pull the covers off and pour the bucket over him.
    So that was what she did. The young king felt first the cold water and then the little fish wriggling and flipping about all over him.
    ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he cried. ‘Ooh! What’s making me shiver? Ooh! Ow! Yes, I’m shivering! I’ve got the shivers at last! Bless you, dear wife! You did what no one else could do. I’ve got the shivers!’
    ***
    Tale type: ATU 326, ‘The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is’
    Source: A shorter version of this was published in the Grimms’ first edition of 1812, but the story as it is here was published in their second edition of 1819, following a written version sent to them by Ferdinand Siebert of Treysa, near Kassel.
    Similar stories: Alexander Afanasyev: ‘The Man Who Did Not Know Fear’ (
Russian Fairy Tales
); Katharine M. Briggs: ‘The Boy Who Feared Nothing’, ‘The Dauntless Girl’, ‘A Wager Won’ (
Folk Tales of Britain
); Italo Calvino: ‘Dauntless Little John’, ‘The Dead Man’s Arm’, ‘Fearless Simpleton’, ‘The Queen of the Three Mountains of Gold’ (
Italian Folktales
)
    A widespread tale, another version of which was included in the Grimms’ volume of annotations to the
Children’s and Household Tales
that they published in 1856. Calvino’s ‘The Dead Man’s Arm’ is the most lively and amusing of his four versions, but as its hero does not specifically set out to learn fear, he doesn’t need the final lesson from the bucket of minnows. Neither does the heroine of Briggs’s ‘The